Method in My Madness

I have never, until this very weekend, played Max Fog's Method in My Madness. One reason is that my spidey-sense tingles when I see the word "madness." I have a serious mental illness. I am not a person who has a major depression every few years (though that is a very real hardship), or a bipolar II who runs up the credit card every once in a while (though that is a real hardship). The federal government recognizes my mental illness to be so serious that it prevents me from sustaining employment. There is a stigma that goes with that. People don't respect it. My partner and I always think *hard* about how to answer the question "what does your husband do?" People feel pretty comfortable being weird about mental illness in public. Perhaps you've seen that around.

I may pay closer attention to representations of mental illness in media than many others because I have a lot of skin in the game.

Method in My Madness is about a person with an overpowering romantic obsession for a man named Cauchy. My initial impressions were very good! The text on-screen is arranged in a very artful and innovative way that conveys the disorganized thinking of the protagonist. Words flicker in and out. Some are horizontal, and some are rotated. Animations sometimes shift the words in interesting ways. I feel this does a very effective job of rendering the abstract situation of obsession as a sort of concrete poetics.

In an earlier time of life, I did have a hard time letting go of a romantic interest, and, while it was never as weird as what we see here, I could almost relate to it. I could see it in the distance. Romantic interest can baffle, confuse, and blind us. The protagonist goes too far, stalking Cauchy. They know when Cauchy takes the trash out, so they meet him there. The presentation of the game keeps pace with the events of the story, both making and confounding sense. It's a mixture that works very well.

However, the game--forgive my use of a tired expression--loses the plot when the unnamed protagonist appears to have a complete psychotic break, forcing themself upon him, injuring him, talking about fairies. The building may or may not burn down.

When I see this kind of story, what I think is that society has failed this person. That's the real story, but what we get is a fireworks display. It's a shame, too, because this setup would have worked perfectly well with a less explosively obsessed protagonist. I can't really recommend this story, though the design itself is of definite interest.

As another reviewer has mentioned, Method in My Madness appears to be a very rare case of timed text working out. The delays, combined with the rotating and shifting texts, are very impressive. Perhaps Max would consider sharing information about his CSS setup when he isn't busy teaching us about ZIL! I expect we'll see more innovations from Max, whose IF career is just beginning.